Editor’s Note: The story was updated Tuesday to include response from the Georgia Department of Veterans Service, including more details of the hiring of the new director at the Georgia War Veterans Home in Milledgeville.
The Georgia War Veterans Home in Milledgeville has a new director, after her predecessor stepped down amid growing concern about the quality of care given to the elderly and infirm residents at the facility.
Dennis Mize, 70, was due to retire at the end of the year following a dozen years at the facility, but people familiar with the situation said that the company that runs the home for the state asked him to step aside earlier.
The development came after an investigation by The Current GA revealed a series of systemic problems at the facility that seven current and former staff members working directly in patient care said affect many of the facility’s approximately 150 residents.
The company, STGi, has not made a public announcement about the leadership change, and did not respond to questions about the new administrator, Jessica Searcy, who previously worked at the Lillian G. Carter Nursing Center in Plains, one of the state’s highest-rated nursing homes. The state agency that oversees the veterans home was part of the hiring process and approved the company’s recommended choice, according to Patricia Ross, the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Veterans Service.
The Current has previously reported that since contracting with the state in 2023, STGi has struggled to retain staff and maintain standards outlined in its contract to run Milledgeville. For instance, nurses on the memory care unit at the facility were frequently reassigned to other floors, leaving the most vulnerable residents without proper levels of trained caregivers. Also, nurses without licenses to dispense medications have given agitated residents psychotropic drugs not authorized by the attending physician.
Since those findings were first published, additional medical professionals familiar with the Milledgeville facility have spoken to The Current and described what they called other issues of concern. Among these examples: a situation in which residents in hospice care were not receiving prescribed and necessary medication due to problems with STGi’s charting and electronic recordkeeping. That issue, which persisted for months, has largely been fixed, they said, but it underscores the perception by the numerous current and former staff members at the facility in STGi’s lack of experience in running nursing homes.
Some medical staff who brought these and other issues to the attention of managers, including Mize, say they had been sidelined or pressured to quit. None of the employees who spoke to The Current were willing to speak on the record for fear of reprisals by STGi and requested anonymity.
The company, which operates VA clinics in several states, did not have any experience with skilled nursing or memory care facilities before the state awarded it the Milledgeville contract. It now runs war veterans homes in two other states.
The head of Georgia’s Department of Veterans Services, Patricia Ross, has previously told The Current that she was unable to provide comment about STGi’s performance, saying it was preparing a new request for proposals to manage the facility and citing state procurement protocols that prohibit the appearance of bias. Ross also noted that annual inspections by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the state revealed no systemic causes of concern at the Milledgeville facility.
In the last two weeks, since The Current’s story was published, veterans organizations across the state have mounted letter writing and lobbying campaigns with state leaders to address shortcomings at the Milledgeville home.
Georgia has nearly 700,000 military veterans, yet it has fewer nursing homes for them than surrounding states and spends less on elderly and infirm veterans than other states, according to the National Association of War Veterans Homes.
More importantly, the state has not demanded the highest standards of care, according to Glenn Cook Jr., the president of the Golden Isles County of the Navy League who was named Golden Isle Veteran of the Year. “Milledgeville is a mess because of bad contracting and management,” Cook said. “As a Navy vet, it hits hard. Surveys show that state’s dropping the ball on basics.”
Retired Gen. Robert Magnus, who lives on St. Simons Island and is the highest ranking veteran in Georgia, has written to Gov. Brian Kemp and Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, requesting an investigation into what he called “maltreatment” of veterans in state care. Magnus was part of the executive committee that examined Water Reed Army Medical Center after reports of adverse medical care emerged in 2007 and 2008.
In a letter dated Dec. 15, Ross pushed back against Gen. Magnus’s lengthy list of complaints, which included some facts reported previously by The Current. “[T]he claims in your letter do not align with the documented findings of federal and state oversight agencies, nor with the operational realities of the Georgia War Veterans Home,” she wrote.
When asked last week what should be done to improve services at the facility. State Rep. Homer “Buddy” Deloach, a U.S. Army Veteran who represents McIntosh, Long and parts of Glynn County and sits on the Defense and Veterans Affairs committee, said the governor’s office needs to step in. The veterans homes are under the executive branch, not legislative, and he and his committee members don’t have “the authority to go tell those people, those contractors or the people supervising them to do something,” he said.
Mize, Milledgeville’s former director, worked at the home since 2013, both under its previous management company as well as STGi. Prior to that, he worked at the state mental hospital that was closed down after the U.S. Department of Justice investigated allegations of mistreatment of patients.
Milledgeville’s new director has told employees and family members of residents that she has been hired to help fix problems. She had approximately a week’s handover with Mize before his last day, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.
Among Searcy’s first directives was to make staff sign nondisclosure agreements, said people familiar with the situation. She also enacted a new visitation policy, whereby people who are not family members of residents must be approved by the facility and the state agency that oversees veterans affairs before they are allowed to visit.
Craig Nelson contributed to this report.